Theatre review: Monster

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Joe Sellman-Leava is best known for his Fringe First-winning play Labels, about the way we pigeonhole each other.

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

****

Although he doesn’t say as much, one such label could be “monster”. It’s the box we use to categorise violent men; the misogynists, the physical abusers, the psychological torturers. Once we’ve called someone a monster, we can forget he may ever have been human.

But what does it take, wonders the actor-playwright in this intelligent and quizzical solo show for Worklight Theatre, for a man to cross the line from fellow human being into the black-and-white landscape of tabloid scum? Is violence latent in every man? Should we buy into the radical-feminist line that all men are rapists? And if not, is there a clear cut-off point between decent bloke and psychopath?

These are questions Sellman-Leava addresses in a semi-fictional story about an actor cast in a play that repurposes Shakespeare’s most vitriolic language to condemn domestic abuse. To the actor, it seems to lack the ring of truth. “All I see is monsters,” he says. “I don’t see men.”

At the same time as trying to learn lines that fail to resonate with him, he is dealing with a girlfriend who is questioning if he is as peace-loving as he claims. Starting to doubt himself, he is haunted by the testimonies of boxer Mike Tyson, convicted of rape in 1992, and actor Patrick Stewart, son of a violent heavy-drinking man whom he called a “corrosive example of male irresponsibility”. One delight of the production is Sellman-Leava’s spot-on impersonations of Tyson’s nasal Brooklyn drawl and Stuart’s rounded baritone, the two representing different faces of male behaviour.

It’s a dense and demanding script, performed with wit and assurance, that gnaws away at an unknowable question: if violence is a choice, how easily can it be made?

Until 28 August. Today 3:15pm.